The official jobs report said that the U.S. economy added 173,000 jobs in August. Here is what it didn’t say: at the end of August, there were 698,000 fewer native-born Americans with jobs than there were at the beginning of the month. ZeroHedge reports:

The one chart that matters more than ever…is the following, showing the cumulative addition of foreign-born and native-born workers added to US payrolls according to the BLS since December 2007, i.e., since the start of the recession/Second Great Depression.

The chart is especially important because what it shows for just the month of August will be enough to provide the Trump – and every other – campaign with enough soundbites and pivot points to last it for weeks on end: namely, that in August a whopping 698,000 native-born Americans lost their job. This drop was offset by 204,000 foreign-born Americans, who got a job in the month of August.

The number netted to a positive 173,000 due, I believe, to seasonal adjustment.

But the punchline: since December 2007, according to the Household Survey, only 790,000 native born American jobs have been added. Contrast that with the 2.1 million foreign-born Americans Ed.: Should be “foreign-born workers”]who have found a job over the same time period…

Here are the BLS numbers, which are as ZeroHedge describes them:

This is a big part of the reason why happy talk about the economy by the likes of Paul Krugman doesn’t fool anyone, and why even Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden don’t try to defend the economic record of the Obama administration. And it deserves to be a huge element in the debate over legal immigration.

Clark Griffith explains why he thinks “Tom Brady will lose and baseball players win.” It’s because “in Major League Baseball, grievances are heard and decided by an impartial arbitrator. In the National Football League, the person who hears and decides grievances is the commissioner.”

I want to focus on a more general question: Why has the Major League Baseball Players Association consistently negotiated more favorable contracts on a full range of issues than its counterpart, the National Football Players Association? One explanation, which comes through in Clark’s piece, is that the baseball players hired smarter people early on.

I don’t dispute this. However, I have a more general theory: baseball players are more ornery than football players (and, for that matter, basketball players).

Football and basketball stars become heroes at an early age. They are worshiped in high school (and sometimes before), courted extravagantly by college recruiters, pampered in college, and then (if they’re good enough) placed directly into the luxurious life of the big leagues. (To be fair, though,a great many come from poor or lower middle class backgrounds.)

Baseball players are less celebrated in high school and college (if they attend). And they almost always enter the profession via the minor leagues, where they typically spend several years (quite possibly five or more if they become professionals right out of high school).

The minor leagues are a grinding, humbling experience. The pay is low, the towns lack glamour, and the bus rides are long, tedious, and not very comfortable.

Thus, my theory goes, when baseball players finally make it, they have a fortitude that their more spoiled counterparts in football and basketball lack. That’s why they are more likely to hang tough in negotiations, as they did most famously during the 1994 labor dispute when the baseball season was lost.

I learned from my father, a labor organizer, that ultimately union leaders are only as tough as they can persuade their members to be. I believe that, at least until now, the leaders of the baseball union have found it easier than their counterparts in other sports to persuade their members, most of whom come up the hard way, to be tough.